Book: A Strange Story, Volume 5.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> A Strange Story, Volume 5.







CHAPTER XLII.

It was twilight when I entered, unannounced (as had been my wont in our
familiar intercourse), the quiet sitting-room in which I expected to find
mother and child. But Lilian was there alone, seated by the open window,
her hands crossed and drooping on her knee, her eye fixed upon the
darkening summer skies, in which the evening star had just stolen forth,
bright and steadfast, near the pale sickle of a half-moon that was dimly
visible, but gave as yet no light.

Let any lover imagine the reception he would expect to meet from his
betrothed coming into her presence after he had passed triumphant through
a terrible peril to life and fame--and conceive what ice froze my blood,
what anguish weighed down my heart, when Lilian, turning towards me, rose
not, spoke not, gazed at me heedlessly as if at some indifferent
stranger--and--and--But no matter. I cannot bear to recall it even now,
at the distance of years! I sat down beside her, and took her hand,
without pressing it; it rested languidly, passively in mine, one moment; I
dropped it then, with a bitter sigh.

"Lilian," I said quietly, "you love me no longer. Is it not so?"

She raised her eyes to mine, looked at me wistfully, and pressed her hand
on her forehead; then said, in a strange voice, "Did I ever love you?
What do you mean?"

"Lilian, Lilian, rouse yourself; are you not, while you speak, under some
spell, some influence which you cannot describe nor account for?"

She paused a moment before she answered, calmly, "No! Again I ask what do
you mean?"

"What do I mean? Do you forget that we are betrothed? Do you forget how
often, and how recently, our vows of affection and constancy have been
exchanged?"

"No, I do not forget; but I must have deceived you and myself--"

"It is true, then, that you love me no more?"

"I suppose so."

"But, oh, Lilian, is it that your heart is only closed to me; or is
it--oh, answer truthfully--is it given to another,--to him--to
him--against whom I warned you, whom I implored you not to receive? Tell
me, at least, that your love is not gone to Margrave--"

"To him! love to him! Oh, no--no--"

"What, then, is your feeling towards him?"

Lilian's face grew visibly paler, even in that dim light. "I know not,"
she said, almost in a whisper; "but it is partly awe--partly--"

"What?"

"Abhorrence!" she said almost fiercely, and rose to her feet, with a wild
defying start.

"If that be so," I said gently, "you would not grieve were you never again
to see him--"

"But I shall see him again," she murmured in a tone of weary sadness, and
sank back once more into her chair.

"I think not," said I, "and I hope not. And now hear me and heed me,
Lilian. It is enough for me, no matter what your feelings towards
another, to learn from yourself that the affection you once professed for
me is gone. I release you from your troth. If folks ask why we two
henceforth separate the lives we had agreed to join, you may say, if you
please, that you could not give your hand to a man who had known the taint
of a felon's prison, even on a false charge. If that seems to you an
ungenerous reason, we will leave it to your mother to find a better.
Farewell! For your own sake I can yet feel happiness,--happiness to hear
that you do not love the man against whom I warn you still more solemnly
than before! Will you not give me your hand in parting--and have I not
spoken your own wish?"

She turned away her face, and resigned her hand to me in silence.
Silently I held it in mine, and my emotions nearly stifled me. One
symptom of regret, of reluctance, on her part, and I should have fallen at
her feet, and cried, "Do not let us break a tie which our vows should have
made indisoluble; heed not my offers, wrung from a tortured heart! You
cannot have ceased to love me!" But no such symptom of relenting showed
itself in her, and with a groan I left the room.




CHAPTER XLIII.

I was just outside the garden door, when I felt an arm thrown round me, my
cheek kissed and wetted with tears. Could it be Lilian? Alas, no! It
was her mother's voice, that, between laughing and crying, exclaimed
hysterically: "This is joy, to see you again, and on these thresholds. I
have just come from your house; I went there on purpose to congratulate
you, and to talk to you about Lilian. But you have seen her?"

"Yes; I have but this moment left her. Come this way." I drew Mrs.
Ashleigh back into the garden, along the old winding walk, which the
shrubs concealed from view of the house. We sat down on a rustic seat
where I had often sat with Lilian, midway between the house and the Monks'
Well. I told the mother what had passed between me and her daughter; I
made no complaint of Lilian's coldness and change; I did not hint at its
cause. "Girls of her age will change," said I, "and all that now remains
is for us two to agree on such a tale to our curious neighbours as may
rest the whole blame on me. Man's name is of robust fibre; it could not
push its way to a place in the world, if it could not bear, without
sinking, the load idle tongues may lay on it. Not so Woman's Name: what
is but gossip against Man, is scandal against Woman."

"Do not be rash, my dear Allen," said Mrs. Ashleigh, in great distress.
"I feel for you, I understand you; in your case I might act as you do. I
cannot blame you. Lilian is changed,--changed unaccountably. Yet sure I
am that the change is only on the surface, that her heart is really yours,
as entirely and as faithfully as ever it was; and that later, when she
recovers from the strange, dreamy kind of torpor which appears to have
come over all her faculties and all her affections, she would awake with a
despair which you cannot conjecture to the knowledge that you had
renounced her."

"I have not renounced her," said I, impatiently; "I did but restore her
freedom of choice. But pass by this now, and explain to me more fully
the change in your daughter, which I gather from your words is not
confined to me."

"I wished to speak of it before you saw her, and for that reason came to
your house. It was on the morning in which we left her aunt's to return
hither that I first noticed some thing peculiar in her look and manner.
She seemed absorbed and absent, so much so that I asked her several times
to tell me what made her so grave; but I could only get from her that she
had had a confused dream which she could not recall distinctly enough to
relate, but that she was sure it boded evil. During the journey she
became gradually more herself, and began to look forward with delight to
the idea of seeing you again. Well, you came that evening. What passed
between you and her you know best. You complained that she slighted your
request to shun all acquaintance with Mr. Margrave. I was surprised that,
whether your wish were reasonable or not, she could have hesitated to
comply with it. I spoke to her about it after you had gone, and she wept
bitterly at thinking she had displeased you."

"She wept! You amaze me. Yet the next day what a note she returned to
mine!"

"The next day the change in her became very visible to me. She told me,
in an excited manner, that she was convinced she ought not to marry you.
Then came, the following day, the news of your committal. I heard of it,
but dared not break it to her. I went to our friend the mayor, to consult
with him what to say, what to do; and to learn more distinctly than I had
done from terrified, incoherent servants, the rights of so dreadful a
story. When I returned, I found, to my amazement, a young stranger in the
drawing-room; it was Mr. Margrave,--Miss Brabazon had brought him at his
request. Lilian was in the room, too, and my astonishment was increased,
when she said to me with a singular smile, vague but tranquil: 'I know all
about Allen Fenwick; Mr. Margrave has told me all. He is a friend of
Allen's. He says there is no cause for fear.' Mr. Margrave then
apologized to me for his intrusion in a caressing, kindly manner, as if
one of the family. He said he was so intimate with you that he felt that
he could best break to Miss Ashleigh information she might receive
elsewhere, for that he was the only man in the town who treated the charge
with ridicule. You know the wonderful charm of this young man's manner.
I cannot explain to you how it was, but in a few moments I was as much at
home with him as if he had been your brother. To be brief, having once
come, he came constantly. He had moved, two days before you went to
Derval Court, from his hotel to apartments in Mr. ----'s house, just
opposite. We could see him on his balcony from our terrace; he would
smile to us and come across. I did wrong in slighting your injunction,
and suffering Lilian to do so. I could not help it, he was such a
comfort to me,--to her, too--in her tribulation. He alone had no doleful
words, wore no long face; he alone was invariably cheerful. 'Everything,'
he said, 'would come right in a day or two.'"

"And Lilian could not but admire this young man, he is so beautiful."

"Beautiful? Well, perhaps. But if you have a jealous feeling, you were
never more mistaken. Lilian, I am convinced, does more than dislike him;
he has inspired her with repugnance, with terror. And much as I own I
like him, in his wild, joyous, careless, harmless way, do not think I
flatter you if I say that Mr. Margrave is not the man to make any girl
untrue to you,--untrue to a lover with infinitely less advantages than you
may pretend to. He would be a universal favourite, I grant; but there is
something in him, or a something wanting in him, which makes liking and
admiration stop short of love. I know not why; perhaps, because, with all
his good humour, he is so absorbed in himself, so intensely egotistical,
so light; were he less clever, I should say so frivolous. He could not
make love, he could not say in the serious tone of a man in earnest, 'I
love you.' He owned as much to me, and owned, too, that he knew not even
what love was. As to myself, Mr. Margrave appears rich; no whisper
against his character or his honour ever reached me. Yet were you out of
the question, and were there no stain on his birth, nay, were he as high
in rank and wealth as he is favoured by Nature in personal advantages, I
confess I could never consent to trust him with my daughter's fate. A
voice at my heart would cry, 'No!' It may be an unreasonable prejudice,
but I could not bear to see him touch Lilian's hand!"

"Did she never, then--never suffer him even to take her hand?"

"Never. Do not think so meanly of her as to suppose that she could be
caught by a fair face, a graceful manner. Reflect: just before she had
refused, for your sake, Ashleigh Sumner, whom Lady Haughton said 'no girl
in her senses could refuse;' and this change in Lilian really began before
we returned to L----,--before she had even seen Mr. Margrave. I am
convinced it is something in the reach of your skill as physician,--it is
on the nerves, the system. I will give you a proof of what I say, only
do not betray me to her. It was during your imprisonment, the night
before your release, that I was awakened by her coming to my bedside. She
was sobbing as if her heart would break. 'O mother, mother!' she cried,
'pity me, help me! I am so wretched.' 'What is the matter, darling?' 'I
have been so cruel to Allen, and I know I shall be so again. I cannot
help it. Do not question me; only if we are separated, if he cast me off,
or I reject him, tell him some day perhaps when I am in my grave--not to
believe appearances; and that I, in my heart of hearts, never ceased to
love him!'"

"She said that! You are not deceiving me?"

"Oh, no! how can you think so?"

"There is hope still," I murmured; and I bowed my head upon my hands, hot
tears forcing their way through the clasped fingers.

"One word more," said I; "you tell me that Lilian has a repugnance to this
Margrave, and yet that she found comfort in his visits,--a comfort that
could not be wholly ascribed to cheering words he might say about myself,
since it is all but certain that I was not, at that time, uppermost in her
mind. Can you explain this apparent contradiction?"

"I cannot, otherwise than by a conjecture which you would ridicule."

"I can ridicule nothing now. What is your conjecture?"

"I know how much you disbelieve in the stories one hears of animal
magnetism and electro-biology, otherwise--"

"You think that Margrave exercises some power of that kind over Lilian?
Has he spoken of such a power?"

"Not exactly; but he said that he was sure Lilian possessed a faculty that
he called by some hard name, not clairvoyance, but a faculty, which he
said, when I asked him to explain, was akin to prevision,--to second
sight. Then he talked of the Priestesses who had administered the ancient
oracles. Lilian, he said, reminded him of them, with her deep eyes and
mysterious smile."

"And Lilian heard him? What said she?"

"Nothing; she seemed in fear while she listened."

"He did not offer to try any of those arts practised by professional
mesmerists and other charlatans?"

"I thought he was about to do so, but I forestalled him, saying I never
would consent to any experiment of that kind, either on myself or my
daughter."

"And he replied--"

"With his gay laugh, 'that I was very foolish; that a person possessed of
such a faculty as he attributed to Lilian would, if the faculty were
developed, be an invaluable adviser.' He would have said more, but I
begged him to desist. Still I fancy at times--do not be angry--that he
does somehow or other bewitch her, unconsciously to herself; for she
always knows when he is coming. Indeed, I am not sure that he does not
bewitch myself, for I by no means justify my conduct in admitting him to
an intimacy so familiar, and in spite of your wish; I have reproached
myself, resolved to shut my door on him, or to show by my manner that his
visits were unwelcome; yet when Lilian has said, in the drowsy lethargic
tone which has come into her voice (her voice naturally earnest and
impressive, though always low), 'Mother, he will be here in two minutes; I
wish to leave the room and cannot,' I, too, have felt as if something
constrained me against my will; as if, in short, I were under that
influence which Mr. Vigors--whom I will never forgive for his conduct to
you--would ascribe to mesmerism. But will you not come in and see Lilian
again?"

"No, not to-night; but watch and heed her, and if you see aught to make
you honestly believe that she regrets the rupture of the old tic from
which I have released her--why, you know, Mrs. Ashleigh, that--that--"
My voice failed; I wrung the good woman's hand, and went my way.

I had always till then considered Mrs. Ashleigh--if not as Mrs. Poyntz
described her--"commonplace weak"--still of an intelligence somewhat below
mediocrity. I now regarded her with respect as well as grateful
tenderness; her plain sense had divined what all my boasted knowledge had
failed to detect in my earlier intimacy with Margrave,--namely, that in
him there was a something present, or a something wanting, which forbade
love and excited fear. Young, beautiful, wealthy, seemingly blameless in
life as he was, she would not have given her daughter's hand to him!




CHAPTER XLIV.

The next day my house was filled with visitors. I had no notion that I
had so many friends. Mr. Vigors wrote me a generous and handsome letter,
owning his prejudices against me on account of his sympathy with poor Dr.
Lloyd, and begging my pardon for what he now felt to have been harshness,
if not distorted justice. But what most moved me was the entrance of
Strahan, who rushed up to me with the heartiness of old college days.
"Oh, my dear Allen, can you ever forgive me; that I should have
disbelieved your word,--should have suspected you of abstracting my poor
cousin's memoir?"

"Is it found, then?"

"Oh, yes; you must thank Margrave. He, clever fellow, you know, came to
me on a visit yesterday. He put me at once on the right scent. Only
guess; but you never can! It was that wretched old housekeeper who
purloined the manuscript. You remember she came into the room while you
were looking at the memoir. She heard us talk about it; her curiosity was
roused; she longed to know the history of her old master, under his own
hand; she could not sleep; she heard me go up to bed; she thought you
might leave the book on the table when you, too, went to rest. She stole
downstairs, peeped through the keyhole of the library, saw you asleep,
the book lying before you, entered, took away the book softly, meant to
glance at its contents and to return it. You were sleeping so soundly
she thought you would not wake for an hour; she carried it into the
library, leaving the door open, and there began to pore over it. She
stumbled first on one of the passages in Latin; she hoped to find some
part in plain English, turned over the leaves, putting her candle close to
them, for the old woman's eyes were dim, when she heard you make some
sound in your sleep. Alarmed, she looked round; you were moving uneasily
in your seat, and muttering to yourself. From watching you she was soon
diverted by the consequences of her own confounded curiosity and folly.
In moving, she had unconsciously brought the poor manuscript close to the
candle; the leaves caught the flame; her own cap and hand burning first
made her aware of the mischief done. She threw down the book; her sleeve
was in flames; she had first to tear off the sleeve, which was, luckily
for her, not sewn to her dress. By the time she recovered presence of
mind to attend to the book, half its leaves were reduced to tinder. She
did not dare then to replace what was left of the manuscript on your
table; returned with it to her room, hid it, and resolved to keep her own
secret. I should never have guessed it; I had never even spoken to her of
the occurrence; but when I talked over the disappearance of the book to
Margrave last night, and expressed my disbelief of your story, he said, in
his merry way: 'But do you think that Fenwick is the only person curious
about your cousin's odd ways and strange history? Why, every servant in
the household would have been equally curious. You have examined your
servants, of course?' 'No, I never thought of it.' 'Examine them now,
then. Examine especially that old housekeeper. I observe a great change
in her manner since I came here, weeks ago, to look over the house. She
has something on her mind,--I see it in her eyes.' Then it occurred to me,
too, that the woman's manner had altered, and that she seemed always in a
tremble and a fidget. I went at once to her room, and charged her with
stealing the book. She fell on her knees, and told the whole story as I
have told it to you, and as I shall take care to tell it to all to whom I
have so foolishly blabbed my yet more foolish suspicions of yourself. But
can you forgive me, old friend?"

"Heartily, heartily! And the book is burned?"

"See;" and he produced a mutilated manuscript. Strange, the part
burned--reduced, indeed, to tinder--was the concluding part that related
to Haroun,--to Grayle: no vestige of that part was left; the earlier
portions were scorched and mutilated, though in some places still
decipherable; but as my eye hastily ran over those places, I saw only
mangled sentences of the experimental problems which the writer had so
minutely elaborated.

"Will you keep the manuscript as it is, and as long as you like?" said
Strahan.

"No, no; I will have nothing more to do with it. Consult some other man
of science. And so this is the old woman's whole story? No
accomplice,--none? No one else shared her curiosity and her task?"

"No. Oddly enough, though, she made much the same excuse for her pitiful
folly that the madman made for his terrible crime; she said, 'the Devil
put it into her head.' Of course he did, as he puts everything wrong into
any one's head. That does not mend the matter."

"How! did she, too, say she saw a Shadow and heard a voice?"

"No; not such a liar as that, and not mad enough for such a lie. But she
said that when she was in bed, thinking over the book, something
irresistible urged her to get up and go down into the study; swore she
felt something lead her by the hand; swore, too, that when she first
discovered the manuscript was not in English, something whispered in her
ear to turn over the leaves and approach them to the candle. But I had no
patience to listen to all this rubbish. I sent her out of the house, bag
and baggage. But, alas! is this to be the end of all my wise cousin's
grand discoveries?"

True, of labours that aspired to bring into the chart of science new
worlds, of which even the traditionary rumour was but a voice from the
land of fable--nought left but broken vestiges of a daring footstep! The
hope of a name imperishable amidst the loftiest hierarchy of Nature's
secret temple, with all the pomp of recorded experiment, that applied to
the mysteries of Egypt and Chaldwa the inductions of Bacon, the tests of
Liebig--was there nothing left of this but what, here and there, some
puzzled student might extract, garbled, mutilated, perhaps unintelligible,
from shreds of sentences, wrecks of problems! O mind of man, can the
works, on which thou wouldst found immortality below, be annulled into
smoke and tinder by an inch of candle in the hand of an old woman!

When Strahan left me, I went out, but not yet to visit patients. I stole
through by-paths into the fields; I needed solitude to bring my thoughts
into shape and order. What was delusion, and what not? Was I right or
the Public? Was Margrave really the most innocent and serviceable of
human beings, kindly affectionate, employing a wonderful acuteness for
benignant ends? Was I, in truth, indebted to him for the greatest boon
one man can bestow on another,--for life rescued, for fair name
justified? Or had he, by some demoniac sorcery, guided the hand of the
murderer against the life of the person who alone could imperil his own?
Had he, by the same dark spells, urged the woman to the act that had
destroyed the only record of his monstrous being,--the only evidence that
I was not the sport of an illusion in the horror with which he inspired
me?

But if the latter supposition could be admissible, did he use his agents
only to betray them afterwards to exposure, and that, without any possible
clew to his own detection as the instigator? Then, there came over me
confused recollections of tales of mediaeval witchcraft, which I had read
in boyhood. Were there not on judicial record attestation and evidence,
solemn and circumstantial, of powers analogous to those now exercised by
Margrave,--of sorcerers instigating to sin through influences ascribed to
Demons; making their apparitions glide through guarded walls, their voices
heard from afar in the solitude of dungeons or monastic cells; subjugating
victims to their will, by means which no vigilance could have detected, if
the victims themselves had not confessed the witchcraft that had ensnared,
courting a sure and infamous death in that confession, preferring such
death to a life so haunted? Were stories so gravely set forth in the pomp
of judicial evidence, and in the history of times comparatively recent,
indeed to be massed, pell-mell together, as a moles indigesta of senseless
superstition,--all the witnesses to be deemed liars; all the victims and
tools of the sorcerers, lunatics; all the examiners or judges, with their
solemn gradations--lay and clerical--from Commissions of Inquiry to Courts
of Appeal,--to be despised for credulity, loathed for cruelty; or, amidst
records so numerous, so imposingly attested, were there the fragments of a
terrible truth? And had our ancestors been so unwise in those laws we now
deem so savage, by which the world was rid of scourges more awful and more
potent than the felon with his candid dagger? Fell instigators of the
evil in men's secret hearts, shaping into action the vague, half-formed
desire, and guiding with agencies impalpable, unseen, their spell-bound
instruments of calamity and death.

Such were the gloomy questions that I--by repute, the sternest advocate of
common-sense against fantastic errors; by profession, the searcher into
flesh and blood, and tissue and nerve and sinew, for the causes of all
that disease the mechanism of the universal human frame; I, self-boasting
physician, sceptic, philosopher, materialist--revolved, not amidst gloomy
pines, under grim winter skies, but as I paced slow through laughing
meadows, and by the banks of merry streams, in the ripeness of the golden
August: the hum of insects in the fragrant grass, the flutter of birds
amid the delicate green of boughs checkered by playful sunbeams and gentle
shadows, and ever in sight of the resorts of busy workday man,--walls,
roof-tops, church-spires rising high; there, white and modern, the
handwriting of our race, in this practical nineteenth century, on its
square plain masonry and Doric shafts, the Town-Hall, central in the
animated marketplace. And I--I--prying into long-neglected corners and
dust-holes of memory for what my reason had flung there as worthless
rubbish; reviving the jargon of French law, in the proces verbal, against
a Gille de Retz, or an Urbain Grandier, and sifting the equity of
sentences on witchcraft!

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